The rural-urban divide is a fact of life in the country, begging for no answer from any expert. It is the most congenitally distinct feature of this land of the pure, that distinguishes the two sectors from each other. The dichotomy is glaring, standing out as wide as the land from the sky.
Shooting skylines chattering to skies, beautiful buildings spilling affluence, smooth roads offering rides, lovely limousines adorning streets, bonny beauties attracting stares and smart people strutting pavements constitute silhouette of the cities. When the late nationalist leader of Sindh, remaining interned for over one-third of his life in the gaol came out, he was astonished by the massive and magnificent development of Karachi.
In an overtly stark contrast and wretchedly bare comparison sits our hugely mute mass of people, constituting 70 per cent of the population and occupying 95 per cent of territory called the countryside. Its charter of duties, inter alia, is fated to work overtime to produce enough culinary components and raw material to oil the mechanical life and industrial activity of the city dwellers.
Despite all this sacrifice of the people of such areas, their condition has not metamorphosed to enjoy an improved lifestyle like that of their brethren settled in cities. They still continue to live their lives in a similar way, no different from the ‘nasty, poor, brutish and short’ life lived by Rousseau’s man in State of Nature. Most of the people inhabiting rural areas are extremely poor, living below the poverty line and not earning the minimum income of one dollar a day.
This scribe has worked out the average income of a household that does not exceed Rs14 a day, if it tills wheat on riverine land watered by a tube well using diesel as the engine fuel. They live in small self-built, thatch-roofed huts, along with their domesticated animals, often tied to the legs of their cots under the same roof, or outside in the courtyard during summer seasons. Covered toilets are virtually unheard of and women use enclosed spaces, while the menfolk use spaces outside their houses. The unpaved and unswept village streets are always studded with cow dung, emitting stinking odour.
Such is the stark truth, the life lived by an average villager hardly differing from the one lived by people in primitive times. Access to markets, much less inter-village links, via proper roads, is rare in a rural setting. The few roads that do exist are scarcely motorable. Dotted with potholes and craters, they hardly offer a care-free and gliding drive. Villagers often rely on dirt paths, zig-zagging cultivated lands and bush clusters to reach their destinations.
The scene of a village located in the rice-growing zone comes to my mind here. The residents virtually have to wade through knee-deep water logging the land to tend to their daily chores. No doubt, this kind of hardship does not last longer than a few months until the paddy crop matures, but the scenario bares the plight of people beyond skepticism. It need not be forgotten that this could not be an isolated paradigm. There could be several such situations, giving sufferance to dwellers, who tolerate ordeals in hushed silence sans producing ripples in the media. The fact is that even these people pay just as much taxes, if not more, than their counterparts relishing comforts in urban settings. Thus, they have as much right to development as the urbanites.
Inaccessibility to family planning and other services, aggravated by lack of awareness of small family norms, exposes couples to father a chain of children who grow into work force, demanding jobs to earn a few bucks to make ends meet. Absence of employment avenues for want of industrial activity, so far uninitiated in rural areas, compels them to set their directions to cities. Exposure of rural families to inhabitable alien environments, delineating cultural diversity, makes their assimilation in city life arduous and hard, due to the economic cost and cultural shock.
Educational facilities up to elementary or even secondary stage are hardly worth the name. These institutions, inadequately staffed and ill-equipped, are housed, specially at the primary level, in make-shift huts. A few of them that boast of buildings of their own invariably fall victim to village chieftains, who use their clout to occupy the premises as their out-houses or grain godowns. The teachers, usually being political appointees, are either underqualified or untrained. They leave classes before time to resume running their shops or looking after their farms. The attendance of students in such classes is thin and with an alarming percentage of dropouts. In such environmental conditions, the standard of education leaves a lot to be desired.
The facility of government-funded health care is worse than education. Rural health centres, scattered miles apart, are mostly non-functional or dysfunctional. The premises stand occupied either by police or by the lately-installed union council staff. The positioned doctors are viewed hankering after influentials to get them posted in city hospitals. Poor patients are left at the mercy of quacks or incompetent compounders, who dispense mixtures and prescribe drugs with definite hazards to their health.
Of late, power has surfaced in some villages. The mass of villages is so large that most of these still remain without electricity. Power outages, such as in the cities, are a norm and not an exception. The duration and frequency of the outages in villages is long and outrageous. Fluctuations and weak voltage during the sizzling summer season reduces the utility of the facility to nullity.
But the most devastating hardship experienced by villagers after injecting costly inputs of fertilizer and diesel, is the disposal of their wheat stocks. Lack of adequate farm-to-market roads multiplies their concerns beyond computation. The lack-lustre attitude of the government to lift their stocks has broken the back and resolve of the tillers to work overtime to produce more. They have no option but to accept the cunningly downed rate of Rs250-60 per 40kg, as against the Rs30O fixed by the government. They become hostage to middle men and commission agents, who rob them of the profit needed to wipe out their credit and improve their food intake.
If the hardships confronted by these rural dwellers are catalogued, the list would become an agonizing litany of endless laments. If adequate attention was paid to attenuating the sufferings of villagers, the sinews of production in the rural sector would have played a still better role in supplying quantitative and qualitative material and services to the urbanites to rotate the wheels of their industry still faster. Military dictators and an industrialist prime minister apart, even our feudal prime ministers, hailing from the countryside, did nothing to develop their areas. Their solitary contribution was self-centred, merely confined to the electrification of the villages where they lived and building link roads, that connected highways and airports to facilitate their mobility unperturbed.
They purposely ignored rural development to keep the masses illiterate. The feudals exploited the masses to the hilt, using the former to launch the latter to potential political careers. Their plans rotated round a strategy to drive a wedge between the urban and rural divide to deprive the latter of awareness to claim their rights, so that they could insulate their vote bank and strengthen their stranglehold on the masses.
An MNA resisted tooth and nail to establish a college in his constituency, reasoning that the students would disturb the tranquil environ of his area by resorting to slogan-mongering and processions even on flimsy pretexts. This led to shifting of the college out of the bounds of his constituency, depriving the youth of the area to up their qualifications. Unless the thinking of the rulers changes, the dream of rural development would never be realized.
No doubt, the agriculture sector is an unorganized one. Half-hearted endeavours to organize it on the pattern of Punjab has not made any headway to attain even a partial success. Their nuisance value being zero, owing to their scattered character, among others, the ruralites cannot put up resistance to corner the authorities to accept their demands, as do the urbanites. But it must not be forgotten that the villagers of the 21st century are not the same mute and gullible men they were during the last century.
Gone are the days, when they used to vote on the directive of the village chieftain on the beat of a drum on the morn of the polling day. They may not be able to resist, but they would also not forego their share in the cake, either. Repeated elections in the country, burst of communication technology and interaction with urbanites has restored the tongues to raise their voices, as they did during the last general elections. Before pledging fealty to them, the village voters elicit assurances from the approaching candidates to attend to their demands, shunning conventional silence and submissiveness beyond comprehension.
One can only hope and aspire that the new administrative order would address the discernible dichotomy with chaste intentions, and develop the rural sector.
The rural-urban divide is a fact of life in the country, begging for no answer from any expert. It is the most congenitally distinct feature of this land of the pure, that distinguishes the two sectors from each other. The dichotomy is glaring, standing out as wide as the land from the sky.
